Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on July 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The generative peculiarity of the twenty-third Psalm lies in its refusal to compromise the threat.
The valley of deep darkness (traditionally, ‘the valley of the shadow of death’) and the surrounding enemies remain intact. Their destructive capacity is not underestimated nor is the enemies’ sinister intention disavowed. They are simply left, in the poetics of the psalm, to be what they are. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Romans, textures on July 29, 2011| 1 Comment »
Paul is not pollyannish in the face of evil’s reality.
The apostle names opposition to God’s purposes with supple and varied vocabulary. There are ‘principalities and powers’, ‘rulers’, ‘dominions’, and ‘authorities’. Paul can discourse widely upon the power of sin and death. He lays hold of imagery of warfare, its weapons, and its equipment to paint the picture of the bellicose environment in which the follower of Jesus sooner or later discovers himself.
Yet in the twelfth chapter of his letter to the Romans, as he describes the confrontation of good with evil, Paul’s language is decidedly civilian.
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:21 NRSV)
Paul places his readers in the power position. They are not so much potential victims of evil as its conqueror. Yet the battle tactics are asymmetrical. They will not experience their conquest over evil as the result of employing evil’s own tools. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Proverbs, textures on July 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The human being, in his or her majestic complexity, is almost inscrutable.
We only rarely know ourselves, and never exhaustibly. How then can we know another?
The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out. (Proverbs 20:5 ESV)
What is his end game? What does she want? What is his deepest passion? How can she find what she seeks? (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Romans, textures on July 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The apostle Paul seems incapable of discerning the intentions of Israel’s God in straight lines and transparent mathematics. Something is always up. Something deeper than we know is in the mix.
When Paul traces mercy’s purpose, mystery—though neither confusion nor cluelessness—is axiomatic. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Romans, textures on July 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »
When the apostle Paul’s discourse turns doxological, it frequently takes the shape of rhetorical questions hurled with gusto into the public arena that his letters create.
Yet Paul is confident enough of his own bearing in the story which fuels his letter-writing that he inserts himself and the answers that course through him into the mix. Paul who asks is Paul who must answer. Perhaps there is too much risk that rhetorical questions might be answered inaccurately by his correspondents. More likely, Paul’s passion seizes the day and declares into the very questions that he has forged.
What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
As it is written: ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.‘ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
These are the queries of a man who has known bitter experience that could plausibly be construed as abandonment by God. A man who has known both extra- and quasi-judicial condemnation, who has been anathematized by his social and religious kin groups would be a strange duck if he had never wondered whether some deep truth resides in their accusation.
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Proverbs, textures on June 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »
A friend looked up at the diseased leaves of the crab apple tree in my back garden this afternoon, one of its limbs hanging down after last week’s storm like an untreated broken arm.
‘Not good’, she intoned with a solemnity so grave that we laughed at ourselves as soon as we had stepped back from the terminal diagnosis it conveyed.
Not good. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on June 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The architecture of ontology in the Hebrew Bible both distances YHWH from his human creatures and brings him very near to them.
YHWH’s altitude—he is portrayed as lofty, exalted, lifted up—is paired in compassionate paradox with his proximity to the most lowly. In one stirring passage in the book of Isaiah, he is exalted and yet lives with the lowly and crushed. In the hundred thirty-eighth psalm, he sees the lowly with exquisite precision.
Though the LORD is on high, he looks upon the lowly,
but the proud he knows from afar. (Psalm 138:6 NIV)
Ordinary conceptions of exalted power are subverted yet again in the second line of the quoted verse, for there he perceives from afar the person who exalts himself to apparent proximity with YHWH. To attempt to move nearer to YHWH by self-exaltation is in fact to distance oneself in a tragic feat of self-deception. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Kings, textures on June 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Elijah’s exhausted flight into the desert after his confrontation with Jezebel and her legion of Baal-prophets should earn from us a bit of sympathy.
The extravagance of his victory over Baal’s servants in a high-stakes mountain-top contest has not erased the singularity of Elijah’s experience. He has won the day, but he has been alone in it. Triumph has not managed to trump solitude. When YHWH engages his prophet in his mountain redoubt—this strange YHWH who suddenly will not be found in earthquake or fire but only as a gentle breeze coaxes Elijah from his funk—he can only speak of what he has done for his divine patron.
I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away. (1 Kings 19:10 NRSV)
Solitude has become neurosis. Neurosis has clouded Elijah’s vision and become a self-fulfilling obsession. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on June 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The visual profile of a piece of Hebrew poetry laid out on a page is occasionally striking. It is no wonder that the aniconic tradition of Hebrew letters develops an artistic whimsy that sets it to playing with the shapes and potentialities of Hebrew script.
Like a teacher’s strong arm on the wrist of a young pupil as he sits before a drawing, Psalm 136 directs the reader’s eye from one corner of its modest shape to the other. She teaches him to see this and then that, to glimpse the magical order in the jumble. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Psalms, textures on June 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The Hebrew word אז (‘then’) is a hinge that occasionally turns more than the expected weight.
In Isaiah 35, for example, אז is the pivot at the beginning of the memorable phrase ‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the mouth of the dumb unstopped.’ The text contrasts the hearers’ present despondent state with the euphoria that shall accompany liberation and restoration.
(more…)
Canter Bridge 